Rod Dreher's Blog, page 238

WPW 2019

Hello from Walker Percy Weekend! I’m settled down in my room at the Myrtles, the haunted plantation house (no kidding), and don’t you worry about me, I’m FINE, just FINE! (Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio…). I realized just now that I didn’t take any photos tonight, despite the fact that I saw Franklin Evans, Jon F., David J. White, Alcuin, and Bernie from this blog. I’ll do better tomorrow, promise.

I picked up Anne Snyder Brooks at the airport on the way to St. Francisville late Friday morning. We ate lunch at Restaurant 1796 at The Myrtles. It’s a new restaurant. I knew that my cousin Daniel Dreher was the sous chef here, but I didn’t realize that he recently became the chef. I’m not just saying this because I’m related to him, but dang, the food was really good. I had cornbread with greens and bacon confiture, and I mean to tell you, it was phenomenal. Then Daniel came out with bread pudding and homemade cinnamon ice cream, raspberry sorbet, and pistachio ice cream. Here he is with his masterpieces:

No kidding, this restaurant is something else.

I met some friends from New York, including Tara Isabella Burton, at The Saint, the new cocktail bar in the St. Francisville Inn.  A couple bought the inn a year or so ago, and totally renovated it. It’s amazing! It’s exactly what you want when you come to the deep South. We had cocktails (gin for me) in the languid mid-afternoon, listening to French cabaret music, and speaking of religious exotica. I didn’t want it to end.

At the St. Francisville Inn

Then, I did an interview with Anne late in the afternoon, talking about community. Met Walter Isaacson, here for his first WPW. Later, the opening night reception at Jackson Hall of Grace Episcopal Church. I spent two and a half hours, literally, trying to get from the bar outside to the food in the church hall, but unable to do it because there were so many great people to talk to. I went through two bourbon and sodas before finally pushing through, and having delicious food. Oh, friends from Birmingham came down, and brought Orthodox me a nice present. More news from me tomorrow.

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Walker Percy Gone Fishin’

Just a note to readers that I’m headed up in a second to Walker Percy Weekend. I will check in when I can to approve comments, and to post pictures, but mostly I’m going to be sweating and drinking bourbon and having a great time with Franklin Evans, Jon F., and the usual suspects. Watch this space!

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In The Romanian Gulag

Sandro Magister has the incredible story of Father Tertulian Ioan Langa, a Greek Catholic priest (d. 2013) who survived torture in Romanian communist prisons for his faith. Excerpt:

I remember Holy Thursday of 1948. For two weeks, every day, they had beaten me with a rod on the soles of my feet, through my shoes: it seemed that lightning coursed through my spine and exploded in my brain. But they didn’t ask me any questions. They were getting me ready, using the rod to soften me up for the interrogation. I was bound hand and foot and hung upside down, and my jailers stuffed into my mouth a sock that had already been long employed in the shoes and the mouths of other beneficiaries of socialist humanism. The sock had become the noise-reducer that prevented the sound from passing beyond the place of interrogation. But it was practically impossible to emit a single moan. Moreover, I had frozen psychologically: I was no longer capable of crying out or moving. My torturers interpreted this behavior as fanaticism on my part. And they continued with increasing fury, taking turns in torturing me. Night after night, day after day. They didn’t ask me anything, because they weren’t interested in answers, but in annihilating a person, something that was delayed in coming. And as the effort to annihilate my will and overshadow my mind was prolonged, so was the torture indefinitely prolonged. The battered shoes fell from my feet, piece by piece.

That Holy Thursday night, in a nearby church, they were celebrating the liturgical office, accompanied by bells that wept as if frightened. I started. Jesus must have heard my suffocated cry when, how I don’t know, I howled from within that hell: “Jesus! Jesus!” Coming out through the sock, my cry was incomprehensible to the jailers. As it was the first sound they had heard from me, they said they were satisfied, sure of having broken me. They dragged me on a blanket to the cell, where I fainted. When I awoke, the inquisitor was standing before me with a ream of paper in his hand. “You’ve been stubborn, criminal, but you’re not getting out of here until you’ve brought out everything you’re hiding inside. You have five hundred sheets of paper. Write about everything in your life: everything about your mother, your father, your sisters, brothers, in-laws, relatives, friends, acquaintances, bishops, priests, religious, politicians, professors, neighbors, and criminals like you. Don´t stop until you’ve finished the paper.” But I didn’t write anything. Not out of some kind of fanaticism, but because I didn’t have the strength: even my mind seemed empty.

More:

As a subject devoid of value and interest to the interrogators, I was transferred to the prison twenty-five feet beneath the marshy ground of Jilava, constructed for the defense of the capital but unusable on account of serious water damage. Nothing survived there except for man, the greatest treasure of historical materialism. In the cells of Jilava, the poor men were packed like sardines – not in oil, but in their own juices, made of sweat, urine, and the water that seeped in, which trickled ceaselessly down the walls. The space was utilized in the most scientific way possible: a patch of six feet by one foot for each person, lying on his side on the ground. The oldest lay on wooden tables, without sheets or blankets. Their thigh bones and the outside of their knees and calves lay along the wood. We lay on the edges of our bones in order to occupy minimal space. Our hands could rest only upon the ankle or shoulder of a neighbor. We couldn’t endure this for more than half an hour; then everyone, at a command, turned onto the other side, because this would have been impossible to do separately. The stack of bodies arranged this way was in two levels, as in bunk beds. But beneath this there was a third level, where the detainees lay upon the bare cement. On the cement, the condensed vapor of the breath of sixty men, together with the water that seeped in and the urine that seeped out of the latrine, formed a viscous mixture in which the unfortunate basted. At the center of the cell-tomb was enthroned a metal container holding about fifteen to twenty gallons, for the urine and feces of sixty men. It had no cover, and the smell and the liquid flowed from it abundantly. To reach it, one had to pass through the “filter,” a severe inspection applied to the bare skin, an inspection during which the entire body and all of its orifices were examined.

They scraped our mouths, the area under our tongues, and our gums with a wooden baton, in case we criminals had hidden something there. The same baton penetrated nostrils, ears, anus, beneath the testicles; always the same baton, rigorously the same for all, as a sign of egalitarianism. The windows of Jilava were made not to give light, but to obstruct it, as they were all completely sealed by wooden planks fastened with nails. The lack of air was such that in order to breathe we went to the door in shifts, three at a time, belly up, with our mouths against the gap beneath the door, a position in which we counted sixty breaths, after which the other inmates would come to recover from fainting and from the lack of oxygen.

Thus we contributed, in our way, to the construction of the most humane system in the world. Did Churchill and Roosevelt know these things when, with a stroke of the pen at Tehran’s shameful table, they established that we Romanians should be ground by the jaws of the red Moloch of the East, that we should be made the cord to secure their comfort? And could the Holy See have had any idea of this?

Read it all. 

This really happened, not in medieval times, but within living memory. The Orthodox priest Father Gheorghe Calciu suffered in the same way, as did the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand. Communists hated Christianity, and were determined to exterminate Christians.

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‘Chernobyl’ And Communism

Are you watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl? If not, you are missing some of the best television ever made. I don’t subscribe to HBO, but got a seven-day free trial through Roku, I think it was. You can watch the previous four episodes of the show, and the series finale on Monday. Please do it. It’s incredible. I might end up subscribing to HBO after this, simply because I want to support in some way works of art like this.

It also surely must count as one of the most powerful anti-communist messages ever committed to film. It’s up there with The Lives Of Others, though not as explicitly anti-communist. It doesn’t have to be. The horror of this true-life story is overwhelming.

The series dramatizes the story of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster by centering on particular characters. We see the unspeakable destruction caused by the plant explosion and widespread radioactive contamination. But what we also see is that the accident itself, and the human suffering it caused, was a direct byproduct of Soviet police-state communism. Mind you, this happened under Gorbachev, not Brezhnev or Stalin. The system itself was so rotten that lies were built into its fabric, in ways that brought the entire thing down. The state’s scientists knew that the kind of reactor in use at Chernobyl was deadly under certain conditions, but kept that knowledge secret from its own experts. The first thing the Soviets cared about when the disaster happened was managing the information to save face. Human lives were expendable. This happens over and over in the series. You come to see that life itself — human life, and all life — is chaff to the Communist Party. Maintaining the system, and the reputation of the system in the eyes of the world, at all costs is the only thing that matters.

The heroes here are ordinary people, like the coal miners and Soviet soldiers who come in and risk their lives to do things that cannot be done otherwise. Why do they do it? Because it’s the right thing to do. These are the people that the corrupt system grinds up, and always ground up, but there they are trying to save others from the consequence of the elite’s actions. I suspect that I’m making this sound moralistic and dull, but trust me, it’s anything but in this series. In episode four, there’s a sequence in which a new soldier has to learn from two experienced soldiers, veterans of the Afghan war, how to kill people’s pets without remorse. They have to do this because the pets, which had to be left behind in the evacuation, are too radioactive to be allowed to live. The young man, Pavel, has to harden his conscience, and the older men teach him how to do it, based on their Afghan experience. That, and vodka.

That sequence shows you how the soul-deadening communist system destroys what is human within people. The whole damn show does that. I can’t stop thinking about it. The radiation that poisons everybody and everything is communism.

If it were only a show about communism, it would still be spectacular. But see, Chernobyl is a show about utopia, institutions, and human nature. A Catholic friend disillusioned with the Church, who is also a fan of the show, texted me the other night to say how much the themes of the series resonate with him, regarding the corruption in the Catholic institution. He’s right about that. You see the same mindless destruction of ordinary people at the hands of an arrogant, morally vacant elite who only want to preserve their own privileges, and protect the institution’s image. You see the fear people had to stand up to the system, and how hard it was for any truth tellers to go against the entrenched powers to proclaim what was actually being done to folks by those who ran the system. Contrariwise, you see the plain people who continue to serve, despite knowing the kind of leadership they are serving, not out of fear, but out of fidelity to something higher than the system. You see the power of the Lie, but also its ultimate weakness. You cannot keep reality at bay forever. Truth really will out.

It’s not just Catholicism, of course. This is how we humans are. The family whose patriarch is an abusive drunk, but which won’t allow its members to tell the truth about it, and who punish those who speak up. The company where people see wrongdoing and even self-sabotage, but keep their mouths shut because the boss will blow up at them if they raise their voices, and may even fire them. The professors who bow to the Lie in their universities, because their career depends on pretending that things they know to be false are true — them, and the commissars who enforce the Lie, because they really believe that they are achieving justice, and a better world, through imposing it. The willingness of people who don’t have anything clear to gain by agreeing to the Lie, but who do so because it’s easier, or because they are afraid both of punishment and of what the world would be like without the ideology and its institutional expression to tell them what to do, and to allow them to make sense of their lives.

A friend of mine spoke out once within her extended family to protest the behavior of an emotionally abusive member of her own family. She was told by an older family member that she was right, but she ought to just learn to put up with it for the sake of keeping the family together. The system depended on everyone’s consent, and there was no sense that the system could and should be reformed. To question it at all was to put the entire thing at risk. There’s some of that in Chernobyl too.

“Live not by lies,” counseled Solzhenitsyn. When you watch Chernobyl, you understand exactly why he said it. And if you think about how what you might call chernobylism irradiates the lives of most of us, in some way, you understand that Solzhenitsyn was speaking to Soviet citizens when he said that, but really, whether he knew it or not, he was talking to all of us.

Here’s the trailer for the show. Please, watch Chernobyl. It’s unforgettable:

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Woke Capitalism Vs. The Unborn

My governor, Democrat John Bel Edwards, signed into law a bill today that bans abortion after the point at which a fetal heartbeat can be detected. I’m so proud of him. I voted for him last time, because he was a pro-life Democrat, and term-limited Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal had botched the job. Looks like I did the right thing then.

Of course now Woke Capitalism is going to punish us, and other states that have passed similar laws. From Variety:

Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger says his film and TV studios are likely to vacate Georgia as a production hub if the state’s controversial heartbeat abortion bill becomes law.

Speaking with Reuters at Disney’s theme park in Anaheim, Calif., Iger said it would be “very difficult” for the content giant to remain in the face of the legislation. The bill seeks to ban abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat,

“I rather doubt we will,” he continued. “I think many people who work for us will not want to work there, and we will have to heed their wishes in that regard. Right now we are watching it very carefully.”

Disney divisions like Marvel have deep ties in the state, where films like “Black Panther” have rolled and four different Marvel TV series, starring the likes of Elizabeth Olsen and Anthony Mackie, are expected to shoot.

Disney becomes only the second Hollywood company with interest in the state to speak out, joining Netflix.

There’s your family-friendly Walt Disney, people.

These laws that have to do with challenging the Sexual Revolution in any way whatsoever — on transgender bathrooms, on abortion — show how much Hollywood and corporate elites despise the people in flyover country. It could not possibly be clearer.

As the Daily Caller points out, Netflix still does business in Egypt, where they imprison women for having abortions. In China, where Disney runs a massive Shanghai resort, the government sends Uighur Muslims to concentration camps — but that doesn’t stop the Mou$e.

It’s the disgusting pro-lifers in their own country that Disney and Netflix can’t stand. They won’t be the only big business interests coming after us. Woke Capitalism is our enemy.

UPDATE: Yep:

Disney CEO: 'To Avoid Filming Among Depraved, Immoral People, We Are Moving All Our Georgia Operations Back To Hollywood'https://t.co/YJIlSZWt0r

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 30, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

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Sohrab Ahmari Vs. David French

I don’t like to see the argument between my friends Sohrab Ahmari and David French. I admire both of them, and of course like them both. But I have to recognize that the substantive core of the dispute is also at the core of my own unsettled political views. It’s an argument worth having on the Right, though I wish it weren’t happening between two men I count as friends, and look up to, and I wish Ahmari had not unjustly accused French of “keeping his hands clean, his soul untainted.” David French has fought hard in courtrooms, as a lawyer, for religious liberty, as an ADF lawyer. If that’s not getting your hands dirty, what is? I have banged out acres of prose over these years about religious liberty, and I can’t imagine that any of that holds a candle to what David French, as a lawyer, has actually done for religious liberty.

French can’t stand Donald Trump, and that seems to be at the core of Ahmari’s ire. French was one of those conservatives who regarded Trump as a betrayal of core principles of conservatism. For his views, French — the adoptive father of a black child — had to endure a torrent of spite from Trump fans that can only be described as satanic. That is important to keep in mind. Personally, I’ve come to think more favorably of Trump than I once did, both because of judicial appointments and because of the raging radicalism of the left, but I think in no way can Trump be rightly understood as an advocate for the restoration of Christian morality in the public sphere. Trump is a symptom of our decline, not the answer to it. Mind you, I can understand traditional Christians voting for Trump as the only realistic alternative to annihilation by the angry left — I might do what I didn’t do in 2016, which is to vote for him — but I can’t understand trying to convince ourselves that he is a good man.

But this is the dispute in front of us, so what do I think about it?

First, a recap. It’s important to know that Ahmari is Catholic, and French is an Evangelical. Not all Catholics and Evangelicals share their respective views, but this is an important fact in understanding their arguments. Anyway, Ahmari started it by writing a pungent piece in First Things condemning what he (unfortunately) called “David French-ism.”  Here he identifies what he means by it:

What is David French-ism? As Irving Kristol said of neoconservatism, French-ism is more a persuasion or a sensibility than a movement with clear tenets. And that sensibility is, in turn, bound up with the persona of one particular writer, though it reaches beyond him to pervade a wider sphere of conservative Christian thinking and activism.

It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French. Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no “polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.” (What prompted my ire was a Facebook ad for a children’s drag queen reading hour at a public library in Sacramento.)

I added, “The only way is through”—that is to say, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.

French prefers a different Christian strategy, and his guileless public mien and strategic preferences bespeak a particular political theology (though he would never use that term), one with which I take issue. Thus, my complaint about his politeness wasn’t a wanton attack; it implicated deeper matters.

The gist of Ahmari’s argument is this: French is a classical liberal, who argues in terms suited to classical liberalism. But classical liberalism is a dead end for Christians, and is nothing more than a way of negotiating our complete surrender to those who hate us and what we stand for. Better to fight with all we’ve got, with the expectation of winning and re-establishing Christian standards in the public square, than to keep ceding ground to those who have no intention at all of tolerating us.

As Ahmari put it:

But conservative Christians can’t afford these luxuries [procedural liberalism, supporting pluralism, etc]. Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

The Ahmari vs. French standoff is a version of what Patrick Deneen, in a 2014 TAC article, identified as “a Catholic showdown worth watching.” Deneen identifies the antagonists not as left vs. right, but a dispute between two kinds of conservatives within US Catholicism. On one side are classical liberals — the Neuhaus/Novak/Weigel folks — who believe that Christianity can be reconciled with liberalism, and enrich it. On the other are those — Alasdair MacIntyre, David Schindler — who believe that they are fundamentally incompatible.

Though Ahmari is Catholic and French is Evangelical, this is near the core of their argument. More on which anon.

Where do I stand? Somewhere unsatisfying between Ahmari and French, for reasons I will explain. Essentially, I lack French’s faith in classical liberalism, and I lack Ahmari’s faith that this is a battle that can be won (also, I’m not quite sure what “winning” would look like, but I’ll get to that).

Sohrab Ahmari (EWTN screenshot)

The man who wrote The Benedict Option will spare you readers a long explanation of why he believes liberalism ultimately eliminates Christianity, and degenerates into what Benedict XVI called a “dictatorship of relativism.” On this point, I agree with Ahmari. I wish I could agree with him 100 percent! But I can’t, and here’s why.

First, if not liberalism, then what? I’m not sure that Ahmari is a Catholic integralist — someone who, broadly speaking, believes that the Church and the State should not be separate — but Catholic integralists have an answer. It is not remotely likely to happen in this fundamentally Protestant country. The Catholic Church can’t even get most of the Americans who profess the Catholic faith to agree with some core Catholic teachings. When integralists convince American Catholics themselves to believe in Catholicism, then we’ll talk.

Besides, how many of us non-Catholic conservative Christians would be willing to live under a political order based on privileging the Catholic Church? I suspect I could, given particular alternatives, because a faithfully Catholic political order would more closely approximate the ideal than a degenerate liberalism. But most of the non-Catholic Christians I know could not and would not, and after the scandal, I would be very hard pressed to accept a political order that privileged the Catholic institution. Look at what happened in Ireland, and in post-Franco Spain. Anyway, integralism is only an answer for intellectuals. I don’t know that Ahmari actually proposes it.

So, for all liberalism’s flaws, there is no alternative that is both preferable and realistic, at least not at the present time.

Second, moral and religious conservatives — especially Christians — are a minority in this post-Christian country. Sorry, but it’s true. I hate it, and wish it weren’t so, but that’s where we are. I can’t see any meaningful protection for us and our institutions outside of liberalism’s structures. Arguments for religious liberty are inherently liberal arguments. Religious freedom is a liberal principle, and a liberal achievement. But what does religious liberty mean in a post-Christian culture? It is not an absolute right, as we all agree (nobody would defend Aztec ritual sacrifice), but where do we draw the lines? It has been clear for some time that most secular liberals will not tolerate religion when it conflicts with equality — LGBT equality particularly. Given that most Americans today support LGBT equality (or at least LGB equality), how are we religious conservatives going to defend our liberties in court if not on a liberal basis? The idea that people should tolerate things that they dislike out of respect for pluralism is a liberal idea — and it’s just about the only thing we Christians have left to stand behind in post-Christian America.

Besides, I concede that I’m more of a classical liberal than I thought I was, in that I resist a coercive political order. I am willing to tolerate certain things that I think of as morally harmful, for the greater good of maintaining liberty. Not all sins should be against the law. Again, though, there’s no clear way to know where and how to draw the line. Sohrab Ahmari uses Drag Queen Story Hour as a condensed symbol of the degrading things that contemporary liberalism forces on the public.

I am a thousand percent behind Ahmari in despising this stuff, and I am constantly mystified by how supine most American Christians are in the face of the aggressiveness of the LGBT movement and its allies, especially in Woke Capitalism. I am also a thousand percent with Ahmari in his general critique of how establishment conservatism tends to capitulate to cultural liberalism. As I wrote in The Benedict Option, seeing how the Republican Party had no legislative agenda to protect religious liberty in the wake of the Obergefell ruling was a radicalizing moment for me.

Still, where I depart from Ahmari, in the main, is that we on the cultural and religious Right are playing a very weak political hand. Ahmari has said that the Kavanaugh hearings radicalized him. Me too! It brought home for me that the Left does not give a rat’s rear end about liberal procedures and principles (the Covington Catholic affair several months later was a similar radicalizing moment). But consider this: conservatives who defended Kavanaugh did so on classical liberal grounds against left-wing illiberalism! And we won! Surely that tells us something.

If Ahmari is calling for a more robust legislative agenda from the Right on cultural matters, then I’m all for that. Here’s a pungent passage from Ahmari’s essay:

How do we counter ideological mono-thought in universities, workplaces, and other institutions? Try promoting better work-life balance, says French. How do we promote the good of the family against the deracinating forces arrayed against it, some of them arising out of the free market (pornography) and others from the logic of maximal autonomy (no-fault divorce)? “We should reverse cultural messages that for too long have denigrated the fundamental place of marriage in public life.” Oh, OK. How do we combat the destruction wrought by drugs (licit and illicit), by automation and globalization and other forces of the kind? “We need to embrace the vital importance of religious faith in personal renewal.” Thanks, Pastor French.

For French, the solution to nearly every problem posed by a politics of individual autonomy above all is yet more autonomous action. But sentimentalization of family life won’t be enough to overcome the challenges posed to it by the present economy. Calls for religious revival are often little more than an idle wish that all men become moral, so that we might dispense with moral regulation.

Government intervention will not be the answer to every social ill. In many instances, free markets and individual enterprise can best serve the common good, albeit indirectly. But I take issue with David French-ism’s almost supernatural faith in something called “culture”—deemed to be neutral and apolitical and impervious to policy—to solve everything. Questions that are squarely political—that is, that touch on our shared quest for the common good—become depoliticized by this culture-first strategy. The libertine camp prefers the same depoliticization, of course; they’re much better at winning in the realm of culture than David French will ever be.

I am not at all sure that that is a fair characterization of David French’s views, but let’s let that stand for the sake of argument. Ahmari wants a more robust, activist government, but active on the side of socially conservative goals. I can go along with that, and indeed there’s probably not much difference between how Sohrab Ahmari thinks the state should intervene, and my views. But here’s the thing: in a pluralistic democracy, if you’ve already lost the culture, how can you hope to elect a government that represents the will of the people, and that supports socially conservative policies?

I wish I saw more evidence that America is a socially conservative country. I wish I saw more evidence that we are a religiously traditional country. It’s just not true, and barring some kind of massive revival, it’s not going to be true for a long time. I am more concerned about religion and culture than politics. I believe in the Benedict Option as a practical response for traditional Christians to the crisis of our time in part because politics are so insufficient to the scope and severity of the crisis. It’s not that I am against politics; it’s that I think politics are downstream from religion and culture, and that we have to first restore a firm cultural basis for a decent politics. At this time, we are fighting (or should be fighting) with all we’ve got just to hold what ground we have.

Many conservatives I know wrongly think that the main part of the battle is political, when the truth is that the absence of moral and spiritual discipline in our own lives, and in the lives of our families and communities, is the root cause of disorder. A Christian academic friend and I were talking a while back about classical Christian education, and he lamented that most of the parents he knew from his local classical Christian school were running away from liberalism more than running towards a vision of classical virtue, Christian or otherwise. This is an important insight. Fighting political battles are necessary, but not remotely sufficient to keep the faith alive. And the faith is not just something we carry in our heads, but is a way of life. The way most of us conservative Christians live — I’m judging myself here too — can often be as much of a threat to passing on the faith to our children as attacks coming from progressives in power.

We have to fight progressivism in politics now in part to protect the institutions through which we pass on our virtues and religious beliefs to our children. But these freedoms won’t mean anything if we don’t use them.

I say all this simply to explain why I don’t have Ahmari’s faith in smashmouth right-wing politics of the Trumpian sort. David French’s fundamental decency as a man and as a Christian is not a fault, but a feature. I don’t get why his decency and honor is a liability. If we lose that for the sake of winning political battles, are we not at grave risk of having sold our souls? Don’t get me wrong, I recognize that sometimes politics may require us to do things we find distasteful (like, well, vote for Donald Trump) for the sake of the greater good. But we can’t let ourselves get to the point of despising decency as weakness — and this is where I depart most from Ahmari, who writes:

Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

What does this mean? The leftists that I fear most of all are those who would throw overboard any standards of decency for the sake of destroying their opponents. These are the leftists who showed themselves in the Kavanaugh hearings, and in the Covington Catholic media pogrom. I don’t believe Sohrab Ahmari is that kind of conservative, not at all, but these kinds of figures have appeared on the pro-Trump Right. We might have to ally with them to defeat a greater evil — Roosevelt and Churchill had to be friends with Stalin, after all — but we should be clear-eyed about what we’re doing, and why.

I’m writing a book now about what we can learn from those dissenters who endured Soviet and Soviet-style communism — what we can learn, I mean, about how to resist the soft totalitarianism the left, including Woke Capitalism, is bringing upon us now. One catalyst for this book project was a Hungarian defector telling me that the most Soviet thing happening in our own culture is the way the contemporary left will stop at nothing to destroy the personal and professional reputations of their opponents, even lying about them if necessary. When you start digging into the history of the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, that’s exactly what you find. The way the Left went after Kavanaugh, and the Covington Catholic boys, were examples of exactly this. 

Is Ahmari proposing that we on the Right have to embrace this ethic? If so, I can’t go there. It’s not a matter of political prissiness. It’s a matter of fundamental Christian moral responsibility.

In the end, I find that I am dragged along into supporting liberal democracy halfheartedly for the same reason that Christians in the Middle East support a secular political order: as the only plausible protection for us, as a minority, in a hostile majoritarian culture. What else is there?

Look, I am a cultural pessimist. I believe that radical individualism is destroying the basis for a stable moral and political order. I believe that our liberal democracy will not be able to endure the loss of small-r republican virtue among the people. I believe in doing what we can within that order to shore it up, if only out of self-interest, but that our primary focus should be on building up the little platoons and lay Benedictine monasteries (so to speak) to endure the collapse of Empire. I see no contradiction between supporting political efforts to rein in the hegemonic roles of institutions like major corporations and universities like Harvard, and in building up our Ben Op communities. But political aggressiveness is not in itself sufficient to do what sensible Christians must want for themselves and their families, and political aggressiveness must be bounded by moral laws and customs.

It’s a difficult time for conservatives and conservatism. The way forward is not clear. I see a role for the David Frenches and the Sohrab Ahmaris. I’m not just being a split-the-difference nice guy here. We need both. But I also recognize that whether I like it or not, we live in a pluralistic, post-Christian society, and that we Christians have to figure out how to deal realistically with that, while also extending to people who don’t share our beliefs the same respect and dignity that we want them to show us. I am grateful that Donald Trump broke the decayed GOP consensus, but I don’t see him as any kind of model for the future.

I wish I had a neat, clean answer to this argument among two bright, articulate conservatives. It’s something I think about all the time as I try to settle this same argument within myself. I have never been able to reach a satisfying place, but this dispute is exactly the one the Right needs to have right now.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to David French’s long, strong response to Ahmari. Excerpts:

“Frenchism” (is that a thing now?) contains two main components: zealous defense of the classical-liberal order (with a special emphasis on civil liberties) and zealous advocacy of fundamentally Christian and Burkean conservative principles. It’s not one or the other. It’s both. It’s the formulation that renders the government primarily responsible for safeguarding liberty, and the people primarily responsible for exercising that liberty for virtuous purposes. As John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Moreover, I firmly believe that the defense of these political and cultural values must be conducted in accordance with scriptural admonitions to love your enemies, to bless those who persecute you, with full knowledge that the “Lord’s servant” must be “kind to everyone, able to teach, and patiently endure evil.”

I’m a deeply flawed person in daily (or even hourly) need of God’s grace, so I don’t always live up to those ideals. But I see them for what they are: commands to God’s people, not tactics to try until they fail. Ahmari does not wrestle with these dictates in his essay. He should have.

… If one rejects kindness because the stakes are so high and our opponents allegedly so terrible, he’s apt to find that there is no inherent power in cruelty. Do Trump’s insults deter his opponents or motivate them? In a time of peace and prosperity, has he expanded his coalition, or, as his reelection campaign kicks off, does he face immense peril in spite of a roaring economy? If he’s allegedly a force for social cohesion, where is that cohesion now?

More:

A core tenet of Frenchism (I still can’t believe that’s a thing) is the consistent and unyielding defense of civil liberties, including the civil liberties of your political opponents — both in law and in culture. That means defending the legal rights of a radical leftist professor with the same vigor that you defend an embattled Christian conservative. And if you despise corporate censorship and corporate efforts to punish dissent, that means supporting not just libertarian Googlers who question Silicon Valley orthodoxy but also kneeling football players who use the national anthem as an occasion for public protest.

So, yes, I do want neutral spaces where Christians and pagans can work side by side. I’ve helped create those spaces, and lived in them alongside Christians and atheists, traditionalists and LGBT Americans alike. In fact, those spaces are the rule, not the exception, everywhere in this nation, and thank God for that.

I’m already going on too long, but let me close with an important point of agreement with Ahmari. He says I don’t see “politics as war and enmity,” and he’s right about that much: I do not see politics as war, and while enmity exists, I seek to lessen it, not fan the flames.

Read the whole thing. 

 

 

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American Pravda

Another day, another example of The New York Times advancing the cultural revolution:

Ever since El Martinez started asking to be called by the gender-neutral pronouns “they/them” in the ninth grade, they have fielded skepticism in a variety of forms and from a multitude of sources about what it means to identify as nonbinary.

There are faculty advisers on El’s theater crew who balk at using “they” for one person; classmates at El’s public school on the outskirts of Boston who insist El can’t be “multiple people”; and commenters on El’s social media feeds who dismiss nonbinary gender identities like androgyne (a combination of masculine and feminine), agender (the absence of gender) and gender-fluid (moving between genders) as lacking a basis in biology.

Even for El’s supportive parents, conceiving of gender as a multidimensional sprawl has not been so easy to grasp. Nor has El’s suggestion that everyone state their pronouns gained much traction.

More:

So last summer, when the Massachusetts State Legislature became one of the first in the nation to consider a bill to add an “X” option for nonbinary genders to the “M” and “F” on the state driver’s license, El, 17, was less surprised than some at the maneuver that effectively killed it.

Beyond the catchall “X,” Representative James J. Lyons Jr. (he/him), a Republican, had proposed that the bill should be amended to offer drivers 29 other gender options, including “pangender,” “two-spirit” and “genderqueer.” Rather than open the requisite debate on each term, leaders of the Democratic-controlled House shelved the measure.

“He articulated an anxiety that many people, even folks from the left, have: that there’s this slippery slope of identity, and ‘Where will it stop?’” said Ev Evnen (they/them), director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, which is championing a new version of the bill.

As the first sizable group of Americans to openly identify as neither only male nor only female has emerged in recent years, their requests for recognition have been met with reservations that often cross partisan lines. For their part, some nonbinary people suggest that concerns about authenticity and grammar sidestep thornier questions about the culture’s longstanding limits on how gender is supposed to be felt and expressed.

“Nonbinary gender identity can be complicated,” said Mx. Evnen, 31, who uses a gender-neutral courtesy title. “It’s also threatening to an order a lot of people have learned how to navigate.”

“They/them”. “Mx”. The Times not only advances this dissolution by the things it chooses to advocate in its news judgment, but by the language it uses. For the most influential news organization in America, this matters.

And this has been going on at an intense level for the past five or six years — in the news media in general, and in particular at The New York Times. In a jaw-dropping Twitter thread, Zach Goldberg nails them. Here is a link to his entire thread, which I strongly encourage you to read. He spent some time over the weekend with the Lexis/Nexis database, searching the frequency of use of particular terms in the database (which archives text from the media sources). Excerpts:

More:

And:

(#6) So many of these graphs look the same that, without the title, it looks like I’m simply reposting a single chart pic.twitter.com/iEoKxpubi1

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) May 28, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Then he starts limiting his search to a single news source, on the grounds that maybe these particular terms are only showing up so many more times because Lexis/Nexis is cataloguing more sources. Goldberg sticks to The New York Times. Lo, the charts all look like these below!:

Please, read the entire thread. It will knock you flat. This is hard evidence that our news media, especially our most important news source (because the Times sets the agenda for so many others, especially network and cable television), went ideologically mad around 2012 — four years before Trump was elected, note well — and began to propagandize for left-wing identity politics.

It’s not right-wing hysteria: the Times, and others (remember, Goldberg started out with a general Lexis/Nexis search), really are out to create a new reality through propaganda. They neither understand nor like their own country, so they’re trying to create a new one. It’s as if the commissars took over the news media, and the Times, and engineered coverage to be a constant flow of Social Justice Wartime propaganda.

Is the Washington Post all that different? I’d like to know.

As you longtime readers know, I’m working on a book about what we can all learn from the experience of people under Soviet and Eastern-bloc communism, about how to identify and resist the soft totalitarianism of our own time and place. This data Zach Goldberg has unearthed is stunning evidence that the media, always liberal, have become ideologically supercharged — and started several years before Donald Trump emerged as a politician.

All right-thinking liberals are freaking out over Facebook not doing a good job (according to them) in managing political propaganda, like the fake Pelosi slurring video. But good grief, what about the sophisticated political propaganda masquerading as neutral coverage of race, diversity, and society? I would love to see somebody with access to Lexis/Nexis do a similar search on terms like “gender binary,” “queer,” and so forth. I have no doubt that the same evidence of crusading propaganda will emerge.

Whenever you hear the American news media talk about “diversity,” you should know that it’s code language meaning narrowing the bounds of discourse to exclude anyone not on the side of Social Justice Warriors. I mean, look, we knew that already, but now we have hard evidence.

Consider this: if a Lexis/Nexis database search showed a similar stratospheric rise in mainstream media of the use of terms and concepts associated with the hard right, wouldn’t you think something crazy was going on? Wouldn’t you suspect that newsrooms had been captured by ideologues? Wouldn’t you lose a lot of trust and confidence in the version of reality brought to you by mainstream media? I would.  What are they manufacturing? What are they inciting? 

Do these people even understand the country they’re reporting on? I cannot believe that NYT publisher A.G. Sulzberger, 38, can look at those graphs and not be shocked and appalled by what is happening in his newsroom. I’m probably wrong about that.

UPDATE: An Aussie reader writes:

Thank you for your consistently interesting and thought- provoking blog. I always enjoy reading it.

Just for fun, I looked up the use of the term “Benedict option” over time from 1995-2017 using the same LexisNexis database that Goldberg quotes.

Unsurprisingly, you will see almost exactly the same shaped graph as the ones you posted. I certainly don’t think that you would come to the conclusion that the American news media are trying to propagandise your views! Of course it simply represents an increase in usage of (and interest in) that new idea. In case you are wondering, the 1995 use of the ”Benedict option” was referring to ordering eggs at a restaurant.

A fair point! But the term did not exist until I started using it, and wrote a book about it. The terms “discrimination,” “inclusion,” and “social justice” have been around for a long time. Not sure about “whiteness,” but the fact that it went from a minor field of study in fringe academia to mass media phenomenon, quadrupling the number of articles in only three years (again, pre-Trump!), tells me that something else is going on. Also, there were 130 articles about the “Benedict Option” at its peak; there were over 2,000 on “whiteness” at its peak.

It’s an interesting question, though: at what point do particular phenomena become “news” because major media are paying attention to it? Wait, that’s a circular way to frame the question. Of course something is “news” only if news media pay attention. What I’m asking is to what extent is a phenomenon artificially inflated by media attention? Or, more interestingly, to what extent does a relatively minor phenomenon become major because the media decide to keep banging away on it?

A classic study on this appeared around the turn of the century, from two Baruch College professors, whose names I can’t remember. If somebody can find a link to the study, put it in the comments and I’ll post it. They went through the archives of major media from around 1980 until the present day (then, around 1998 or so), looking to see how the media covered the rise of the religious conservatism in the GOP. They found gobs of articles — which were justified, because the rising political influence of the Religious Right really was a significant phenomenon. But the professors also found that the media entirely missed the concomitant rise of the Secular Left in the Democratic Party. Their hypothesis was that because journalists are overwhelmingly on the left, they could not see the parallel phenomenon, because it just seemed normal to them.

Back in 2012, surveys showed that the American public consistently, and massively, overestimated the size of the gay and lesbian population. Makes sense, if you judged the size of the gay and lesbian community by the media attention to them.

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Lying For God

Last night I was texting with a Catholic friend, and told him about how the late Father Benedict Groeschel lied to cover himself. Groeschel, trained in psychology, had a lot to do with recycling sexually predatory priests back into the community, via his treatment center. Because he was known to be theologically conservative, and was an EWTN star, he was untouchable among conservatives. I wrote last year, when the McCarrick scandal broke:

I am personally aware of a case in which a conservative superstar priest, the late Father Benedict Groeschel, manipulated the conservative Catholic public’s suspicion of the news media to hide from legitimate questions about his own role in covering up abuse. I wrote about it here. In brief, Groeschel, a psychologist, ran a factory that recycled sexually abusive priests. In 2002, or perhaps early 2003, Brooks Egerton, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, tried to contact Groeschel to ask him about some of these cases, Groeschel refused to speak to him. Egerton called me at National Review, asking me why Groeschel wouldn’t return his calls, and asking if I knew any way to reach him. Eventually, Egerton published a story … which Groeschel promptly denounced as filled with lies and distortions. He said, in particular:

Mr. Egerton’s article is a prime example of the hostility, distortion and planned attack on the Catholic Church in the United States by certain segments of the media.

Groeschel’s words were disgraceful. Again, Egerton tried multiple times to get Groeschel on the phone to explain his side of the story. Groeschel refused to talk to him, and then when the story came out, denounced it as a “planned attack on the Catholic Church.” It was a lie, but a lot of people wanted to believe that lie. That’s how aiders and abetters of the scandal, like Benedict Groeschel, got away with it.

One of the lasting effects of the church abuse scandal, at least for me, is to learn how eagerly and easily cardinals, bishops, and influential priests will lie for the sake of preserving a false front, and hiding their own guilt. For example, Cardinal Ted McCarrick was named by the Vatican to lead its response to the initial wave of scandal. Here he is from a 2002 interview with the USA Today editorial board:

If after all we’ve gone through, someone would still violate the kind of relationship we need with children, with young people, that person should be out of the ministry immediately. So looking forward, I think there is no difference of opinion among the cardinals. Or among the bishops. Everyone I’ve spoken to feels anyone who would do this now — after we’ve passed through all this — is either sick, therefore should not be a priest, or defiant, and therefore should not be in the ministry.

Cardinal McCarrick is now Mr. McCarrick. He was defrocked for sex abuse last year. McCarrick was filthy, and there is evidence that high-level people in Rome knew he was filthy before he was made cardinal archbishop of Washington.

Last year there was intense controversy over Vatican diplomat Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s allegations that Rome had long known of McCarrick’s behavior — and that Benedict XVI had placed McCarrick on restriction, which the arrogant cardinal ignored with impunity. Viganò said that he personally told Pope Francis about McCarrick, but that made no difference. Francis brought McCarrick, a key ally, out of the cold, and put him to work as an envoy.

Well, newly released correspondence shows that the Vatican had, in fact, put McCarrick on restriction — and McCarrick’s successor, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, knew about this. Excerpts from the Crux report:

In one letter, McCarrick suggests the Vatican wanted to “avoid publicity” and thus kept the restrictions confidential.

The correspondence also shows that despite the restrictions, McCarrick gradually resumed traveling and playing prominent diplomatic roles under both Popes Benedict XVI and, to a greater extent, Francis, including talks with China that may have helped shape a controversial 2018 deal between Rome and Beijing over the appointment of bishops.

McCarrick’s activities were not carried on in secret, as he regularly wrote to Pope Francis between 2013 and 2017 to brief him on his trips and activities.

In the correspondence, McCarrick denies any sexual misconduct.

“I have never had sexual relations with anyone,” he wrote, but he does admit to “an unfortunate lack of judgment” in sharing his bed with seminarians in their twenties and thirties.

More:

From an examination of the correspondence, which involves emails and private letters from McCarrick over the period 2008-2017, it appears that senior Church officials, including the Vatican’s Secretary of State under Pope Benedict XVI, the head of the Congregation for Bishops, and the pope’s ambassador in the U.S., were aware of the informal restrictions, and whatever their response may have been as McCarrick resumed his activities, it did not prevent him from doing so.

McCarrick also writes that he discussed the restrictions with Wuerl in 2008, saying Wuerl’s “help and understanding is, as always, a great help and fraternal support to me.” In a 2008 letter to the papal ambassador in the U.S., McCarrick said he had shared a Vatican letter outlining the restrictions with Wuerl.

Wuerl, who resigned as McCarrick’s successor as the Archbishop of Washington last October amid criticism in a Pennsylvania Grand Jury report of his handling of abuse cases as the Bishop of Pittsburgh, initially denied knowing of abuse charges against McCarrick until they became public in 2018, though in January he admitted to a “lapse in memory” with regard to one allegation that reached him in 2004.

Read the whole thing. Wuerl is still denying.

Here’s the source of that reporting: a website written by McCarrick’s former personal secretary, Msgr Antonio Figueiredo.  Crux says it had an expert examine the original correspondence, and determined them to be authentic. The monsignor writes:

In the subsequent sections, I present facts from correspondence that I hold relevant to questions still surrounding McCarrick. These facts show clearly that high-ranking prelates likely had knowledge of McCarrick’s actions and of restrictions imposed upon him during the pontificate of Benedict XVI. They also clearly show that these restrictions were not enforced even before the pontificate of Francis. It is not my place to judge to what extent the fault lies with the failure to impose canonical penalties, instead of mere restrictions, at the start, or with other Church leaders who later failed to expose McCarrick’s behavior and the impropriety of his continued public activity, and indeed may have encouraged it. My intention throughout this report is to present facts – not judgments or condemnation of anyone – for the protection of minors and vulnerable persons, the salvation of souls, and the good of the Church Universal. As a priest ordained by then Archbishop McCarrick and one who served him closely, I reflect often upon how much damage to the physical, psychological and spiritual lives of so many might have been avoided had the restrictions been made public and enforced as soon as they were imposed.

Neither Benedict nor Francis come off looking good here. There is written evidence from McCarrick himself that he was put on informal restriction. When he flouted the restrictions, nothing happened to him.

Figueiredo seems to have been motivated by personal repentance. He was arrested in a drunk-driving accident last year, and indicates that he became addicted to alcohol. He has now embraced a life of sobriety. Whatever the monsignor’s motivations, the documents are judged to be authentic. He goes on:

It is clear that for far too long, a culture has existed in the Church that allowed those like McCarrick to continue their public activity after serious and even settled allegations had come to the attention of Church leaders. Moreover, it is all too evident that Cardinals, Archbishops, and Bishops – in their cover up – until quite recently have enjoyed the propitious benefit of a more “forgiving” and “lenient” standard of evaluation as compared to those applied to lower ranking clerics and religious. A double standard and non-independent accountability harm the credibility of Church leadership and impede efforts to reestablish fundamental trust in the Catholic clergy.

Speaking of re-establishing fundamental trust, the Vatican press office initially released a transcript of Francis’s May 21 interview, omitting the part where he said he’s not sure if he was told about McCarrick. The version the press office put out featured a flat denial by the Pope. Only when reporters questioned the press office did it release a corrected version, in which Francis said he wasn’t sure if Viganò told him about McCarrick, and just forgot about it.

Responding to the original, full Spanish language transcript of the interview, Archbishop Viganò pulled no punches:

In comments to LifeSite following the release of the interview, Archbishop Viganò said: “What the Pope said about not knowing anything is a lie. […] He pretends not to remember what I told him about McCarrick, and he pretends that it wasn’t him who asked me about McCarrick in the first place.”

More:

In the May 28 interview, Alazraki presses Pope Francis further on whether or not he knew about former cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s misdeeds.

“I didn’t know anything about McCarrick, obviously, nothing, nothing,” he says. “I’ve said that several times, that I didn’t know, I had no idea.”

It’s unclear as to what Pope Francis is referring to when he says that he denied knowledge of McCarrick’s immoral activities on several occasions as his refusal to comment one way or another has been a particularly notable element of the scandal.

Pope Francis continues: “When [Archbishop Viganò] says that he spoke to me that day [on June 23, 2013], that he came … I don’t remember if he told me about this, whether it’s true or not, no idea! But you know that I didn’t know anything about McCarrick; otherwise I wouldn’t have kept quiet, right?”

Archbishop Viganò observed of this remark: “He tries to be clever, claiming that he doesn’t remember what I told him, when he was the one who asked me about McCarrick.”

Who has more credibility in this matter: Viganò or Francis? At this point, how is this even a serious question?!

UPDATE: I want to add that this toxic climate of deception contributes to what I consider to be a true injustice against Cardinal George Pell, apparently railroaded by an Australian court on trumped-up abuse charges. I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that Pell was made a scapegoat.  I don’t say this because Pell is known as a conservative; I say it because this trial and conviction were so bizarre. See here for more details. Again, I might be wrong about this, but I believe that Cardinal Pell did not lie here, but his credibility was savaged because so many high-ranking churchmen did lie about abuse, and accepted public alibis that they knew to be lies.

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Tomorrow’s Republicans Today

Longtime readers know that I’ve been down on the Republican Party for years. I left it formally in 2008, disgusted over the Iraq War and cronyism (specifically, the fact that despite 9/11, the Republican president put a provincial GOP deadhead in charge of FEMA, which was not ready for Katrina). I almost always vote Republican in national elections, not with any enthusiasm, but because on the issues I care about most — abortion, religious liberty, and various “social” concerns — the Republicans are better than the Democrats. I was no fan of Donald Trump, considering him to be a vulgar, crooked, unstable and unprincipled politician whose chief virtue was that he wrecked the Republican Party establishment. That, and the possibility that he would appoint good judges. Well, he has generally appointed good judges. But I remain Not A Fan, and the GOP has not distinguished itself by forging a new kind of conservatism out of the rubble demolished by Trump.

However! In the past month or so, I’ve become interested in, and even excited by, the possibility of Republican politics in a way I haven’t been in over a decade. First there was this speech J.D. Vance delivered at the TAC gala a few weeks ago. Excerpt:

I have been criticized from the Right for writing a book that if taken to its logical conclusions, would lead to a lot of big government programs, and I’ve been criticized from the Left for writing a libertarian small-government manifesto. And I don’t totally know what that means, maybe I’m just not a very good writer.

But what I think it means is that I was and continue to struggle with this idea of where does personal responsibility interact with the responsibility of politics in the broader society? I was in Southeastern Ohio, which is really ground zero for the opioid epidemic not too long ago, and I was talking with a woman who’s the only licensed youth counselor in that section of Ohio, a very tough job in an area very hard hit.

And she was telling me about an eight-year-old kid of hers, an eight-year-old patient, who had become addicted to opioids. Now, the way this kid had become addicted to opioids is that his parents, like a lot of folks in the area, dealt drugs on the side to support their habit, and because they didn’t have a lot of money, they would reward this kid, they would send this kid on drug runs to deliver the drugs. And when he made a successful delivery, they would give him a Vicodin because they didn’t have a whole lot of money laying around, but they had a whole lot of pills laying around.

And so, at the tender age of eight, this kid is addicted to a substance with incredibly powerful and long-lasting effects on

J.D. Vance delivers the keynote address at The American Conservative’s May 9 gala in Washington, D.C.

his young brain. And it occurs to me that folks on the Left will look at a kid like that and say, “Well, if that kid just had better job opportunities and better educational opportunities, that all of his problems would go away.” That strikes me as so naïve, so ignorant of the role of family and community, so ignorant of the role of some individual choice, that despite that kid’s disadvantage, he still has some hope in the world.

But for the folks on the Right, and I think there’re unfortunately too many of them, who look at that kid and say, “Well, he just needs to exercise some more personal responsibility and he’ll have his fair share of the American dream.” I think that they’re missing something fundamental, something that Edmund Burke would’ve recognized, that the institutional and economic and community dynamics in which we’re raised, they influence us, they influence what’s possible to us, they influence what’s available to us, and they influence how we ultimately exercise that personal responsibility that’s so important.

And so, at a fundamental level, I think we have to develop a cultural aesthetic within the conservative movement that encourages that young boy to see himself as an agent, to see himself as a person with hope and optimism for the future. And one of the reactions I’ve always had to the politics on the Left is this view that somehow because people are disadvantaged, because they are poor, they have no control and they have no agency. I rejected that as a kid, it’s one of the reasons that I adopted the politics that I did.

But we make a mistake, I think, many of us on the Right, many conservatives make the mistake of looking at that kid and ignoring the role that politics must play in giving that kid a better shot and a better chance at his dreams. And I say his dreams because that is an important thing that is so often missing from this conversation about the American dream.

It’s a concept that if you ask 100 different people in this town, you would probably get 100 different answers, but Washington, D.C., as we all know, is fundamentally a town of strivers, it is a town of people who are seeking power, responsibility, influence.

But the American dream of my youth, and I suspect the American dream of that eight-year-old boy, is not to become a chief of staff to a powerful member of the Senate, it’s not to become an executive of a Fortune 500 company, it’s to become a good dad one day, a good husband, a person who works at a dignified and meaningful job that allows him to put food on the table.

Read it all. Seriously, do. If you’re anything like me, you’ll get to the end of it and wonder when this guy is going to run for office. If there were a hundred Republicans like him, we could have a very different party.

It turns out that there is already a Republican like him sitting in the US Senate: first-term Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. I was traveling overseas when he gave his first-ever Senate floor speech, and so I missed commenting on it at the time. Here’s a link to the whole thing — and it is remarkable. It’s a speech about dignity, and its sources. Excerpts:

The chattering class often tells us that all of this—the jobs, the despair, the loss of standing—is the result of forces beyond anyone’s control. As if that’s an excuse to do nothing.

But in fact, it’s not true.

Today’s society benefits those who shaped it, and it has been shaped not by working men and women, but by the new aristocratic elite.

Big banks, big tech, big multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media—these are the aristocrats of our age.

They live in the United States, but they consider themselves citizens of the world.

They operate businesses or run universities here, but their primary loyalty is to their own agenda for a more unified, progressive—and profitable—global order.

These modern aristocrats often claim to be a meritocracy. And many of them truly believe they are. What they don’t see, or won’t acknowledge, is that the society they have built works mainly for themselves.

They’ve effectively run this country for decades. And their legacy is national division and national decline.

More:

To those who despair at the task ahead, I say the hour is not too late, the crisis is not too deep for the determined effort of a great people.

And to those who feel forgotten and unheard, I say this is your time.

Now we must stand together to renew the promise of our enduring revolution.

We must put aside the tired orthodoxies of years past, and forge a new politics of national renewal.

We must begin by acknowledging that GDP growth alone cannot be the measure of this nation’s greatness. And so, it cannot be the only aim of this nation’s policy. Because our purpose is not to make a few people wealthy, but to sustain a great democracy.

And so, we need not just a bigger economy, but a better society.

We need a society that offers rewarding work for every worker who wants it, wherever she is from, whatever degree he might have, whether their ambition is to start a business or to start a family.

We need a society that will allow towns and neighborhoods to flourish across the great heartland of this country, not just in the mega-cities of the coasts.

We need a society that puts American workers first, that prioritizes them over cheap goods from abroad, and offers them the chance to better their station.

All this we must fight for and more.

We need to repair the torn fabric of our common life. We need a politics that prioritizes strong marriages and encourages strong families, where children can know their parents and be nurtured by their love.

We need strong schools and churches and co-ops.

Because these are the things that make liberty possible.

Read the whole thing. One thing that struck me about Hawley’s speech is how he identified Silicon Valley as an antagonist, and as one source of decay and decline. I commend to all of you Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism. This is not a right-wing book, but it is a political book, in that the former Harvard Business School professor discusses in great depth the control that Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook have over our lives, via the personal data they mine, and how supine Washington is in the face of their lobbying.

I was also startled (in a good way) by Hawley’s attack on a Trump nominee for the federal judiciary. Michael Brendan Dougherty explains what happened, and what it means. Excerpt:

Hawley also got some conservatives’ attention by blasting Michael Bogren, a Trump judicial nominee to the U.S. District Court in western Michigan. Hawley hammered him for his legal work defending East Lansing’s ban against a Catholic farmer’s participation in a public farmers’ market because the farmer announced his intention on Facebook to continue renting his orchard for weddings, but not same-sex ceremonies. As part of his legal arguments, Bogren had said there was no distinction between the Catholic family running their orchard in accordance with their faith and the Ku Klux Klan persecuting non-whites. Hawley grilled the nominee, saying that his unflattering comparison failed the test that Justice Anthony Kennedy had outlined in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in which anti-religious animus was deemed to be at work in Colorado’s application of non-discrimination law.

Our own Ed Whelan thought that Hawley was being impolitic. But the moment went viral among religious conservatives, putting them on notice that this young senator would zealously defend not only their legal rights, but — crucially — their social reputation. Hawley demonstrated an understanding that is rare among Republicans. Many of us had complained that Kennedy’s ruling invited states to discriminate against conservative religious people, only to do it more politely. But Hawley turned that on its head, essentially saying that anyone who even privately believed that the normal moral and sacramental beliefs of Catholics were hateful was unqualified to hold a public trust. Hawley understands instinctively that Catholics and Evangelicals will lose their institutions — their hospitals, colleges, and charities — if they submit to the progressive pretense that their religion makes them indistinguishable from racist terrorists. Americans let the KKK march in their idiotic uniforms, but no one would tolerate them running a college, hospital, or home-school cooperative. Hawley’s willingness to pick a surprise fight will put other judicial nominees on notice. That’s all to the good.

Yes, I agree. Reason‘s David Bernstein called Hawley a “first-class demagogue” because of this attack on the nominee. Bernstein, a law professor, said that Bogren’s job as city attorney was to defend the law in question as well as he could, and that he should not be penalized for doing so. Nor, said Bernstein, should the views of his client (the city) be necessarily attributed to him. I think that is a fair critique on the specifics, but it misses what I assume Hawley was trying to do here.

MBD is right: Hawley seems to understand that the movement in legal culture and certainly in popular culture to equate ordinary Christian belief on homosexuality with KKK ideology is laying the groundwork for the marginalization, indeed the demonization, and the dispossession of Christians in this country. Bogren may be right strictly as a legal matter, but if so, that fact ought to alarm millions of Christians in America who are at the moment completely clueless as to the coup taking place in courtrooms and in the moral imaginations of Americans. Several years ago, a well-known Evangelical leader told me that when he gives talks to congregations about the future of religious liberty, he tells them that the day is coming when the things they believe will be denounced as the equivalent of Klan ideology. That day is here, and Josh Hawley called it out. I repeat MBD’s line:

Americans let the KKK march in their idiotic uniforms, but no one would tolerate them running a college, hospital, or home-school cooperative.

If you are an ordinary Christian who holds standard orthodox Christian beliefs about sexuality, and you think for one second that your religious institutions will be left alone after having been tarred by attorneys representing the state, as well as the agents of popular culture, with the Klan smear, then you are dreaming.

Sen. Josh Hawley gets it, and is not willing to see Christians and their institutions destroyed for the sake of observing legal proprieties. Do any other Republicans? Many of the kinds of civil society institutions that both J.D. Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley recognize are necessary to reknit a badly fraying social fabric will be ripped to shreds by the Klan smear, both in law and in culture. Few if any Republicans have the backbone to make that explicit. Josh Hawley does. More, please.

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View From Your Table

St. Francisville, Louisiana

It was a busy VFYT day. Started this morning having breakfast with my mom at the Bird Man Cafe in St. Francisville. If you’re coming to town for Walker Percy Weekend this weekend, you will be thrilled to learn that Lynn Wood is now cooking sourdough biscuits!

Later in the day, I went to New Orleans with my son Matt. We met my friend Dorian Greene at Bar Marilou, where friend and I had cocktails. It’s a picturesque bar, and here’s a good VFYT, except for the fact that I bumped the table moving into position to take it, and spilled my drink (the one on the left, which involved gin, amaro, and habanero bitters):

New Orleans, Louisiana

I’m not much of a cocktail aficionado, because almost all of them are too sweet for me, but there was a lot going on in that glass.

And then Matt and I met my pal Andrew T. Walker for dinner at Herbsaint. Andrew is in town this week to teach at the New Orleans Baptist Seminary, and said he wanted to try gumbo for the first time. Well, the best place to get it is Herbsaint. Andrew said it did not disappoint. For his meal, Andrew (that’s him on the left) had the duck confit. I had steak with the most delicious fries I might ever have eaten on this planet. With aioli.

New Orleans, Louisiana

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